Trivia / Bubble Bobble

• Follow the Leader: Bubble Bobble has a few arguable imitators, Snow Bros and Saboten Bombers to name a couple.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The source code for the original arcade game has been lost, forcing ports to try to recreate the physics from memory with varying degrees of success (the Master System version is said to be the closest).
• Port Overdosed: Bubble Bobble, Rainbow Islands and some games in the Puzzle Bobble/Bust-a-Move series are exceptionally widespread games, having appeared on virtually everything able to play games since their initial releases—which includes, in Bubble Bobble's case, every home computer of the 1980s.
• Prop Recycling: Curiously, the bubbles around the player characters (used for level transitions) in the two Part 2 games (2 for NES and Junior for Game Boy) are the same size in pixels, even though the characters themselves are of different sizes.
• Schedule Slip: A port of Parasol Stars for Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 was planned for 2023, but got delayed for unknown reasons.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Bubble Symphony has a Dummied Out witch boss, a giant female Dranko on a broomstick, who doesn't appear in the final game for whatever reason. Then again, a Dranko does appear in one of the bad ending cutscenes.
  • Also, the dumped prototype of Symphony shows the game was going to use a rendition of the original Bubble Bobble theme as main theme, which got used as a "secret" theme for the Classic Mode cheat in the final version.
  • Parasol Stars almost had a Commodore 64 port, but the developer's alcoholic wife destroyed his computer and all the backups for the game in a drunken rage. Out of respect for the developer and his personal life, Ocean initially claimed his computer was stolen in a burglary.
  • In the official announcement trailer for Bubble Bobble 4 Friends, the bubble dragons are displayed with their longer names and are named after the roster of Bubble Symphony: Bubblun, Bobblun, Cururun, and Cororon. In the final version, they go by their shortened names from Bubble Bobble Plus!: Bub, Bob, Peb, and Pab.

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